How to Install a Highly Available SCVMM Management Server

Since System Center Virtual Machine Manager is starting to get more and more important and starts to be a critical application for your environment especially if your are using Hyper-V Network Virtualization and SCVMM is your centralized policy store, you should install Virtual Machine Manager highly available. To do this Virtual Machine Manager uses the Failover Cluster feature integrated in Windows Server.

Before you begin check this important nodes

Not only the SCVMM Management Server should be high available, also the SQL Server where the SCVMM database is installed and the file share for the library share should be highly available.

You can have two or more SCVMM Management server in a cluster, but only one node will be active.

You will need to configure Distributed Key Management. You use distributed key management to store encryption keys in Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) instead of storing the encryption keys on the computer on which the VMM management server is installed.

Create a SCVMM Service Account which has local admin rights on the SCVMM nodes.

Create a container in Active Directory Domain Services for the Distributed Key Management.

Set all IP addresses, you may also configure an independent Heartbeat network

Install the Failover Cluster feature on both server.

After you have done this steps you start to create a Failover Cluster with both nodes.

You built the SCVMM Cluster, now you have to install the SCVMM Service on the first node. You can start the SCVMM Installer and will automatically detected the SCVMM Cluster and will ask you if you want to install the SCVMM server as high available installation.

The installation is now more less the same as for a standalone Virtual Machine Manager Server, expect you have to use Distributed Key Management and one screen where you configure the SCVMM Cluster Role with a name and an IP address.

After you have installed the first node you can now run the setup on the second node. The setup does also see the cluster and the SCVMM Cluster role, and will ask you about the configuration. Many of the settings cannot be changed because they are the same on all nodes.

After you have installed both nodes you can see the SCVMM Cluster Role in the Failover Cluster Manager.

And you can of course also see all your Virtual Machine Management servers in the Virtual Machine Manager console.

7 Responses to How to Install a Highly Available SCVMM Management Server

Would you support/recommend installing a 2-node SCVMM guest cluster on VMs on the host cluster that SCVMM is managing?

In the absence of dedicated hosts for a management Hyper-V cluster or a physical SCVMM cluster this seems like a reasonable option (and maybe even a preferred option even if physical hosts were available). AFAIK the only real caveat is that to LM either of the SCVMM servers you would have to use FCM.

Well depends how you define HA. HA in Hyper-V Clusters and VMware Clusters for example is the same, the VM has to be restarted after a failover. This is the same for the VMM service in a Failover Cluster configuration.

I’m trying to install VMM 2012 R2 in HA but when configuring the 1st node at the Cluster Configuration step it fails with: VMM cannot be installed because the cluster requires a static IP address for the VMM and no valid static IP address was specified. If I fill in an IP i get the error that VMM High availability cannot be installed with a cluster in one domain and the VMM management server in another domain, although the IP that i’ve filled in is from the same domain and the servers are configured with static IP.

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My name is Thomas Maurer. I am a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. I am part of the Azure engineering team and engage with the community and customers around the world. I am located in Switzerland. I am focusing on Microsoft technologies, especially cloud and datacenter solutions based on Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack and Windows Server. Opinions are my own.